On Friday I devoted 99% of my 20/20 vision to a peculiar question asked by a participant in the CNN YouTube Republican presidential debate. You remember the one—a fellow named Joseph from Dallas dangled a King James Version of the Bible directly in front of the camera and asked: “Do you believe every word of this book? And I mean specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand.”
The whole strange sequence led me to float three hunches, one of which, I now think, needs to be tweaked. My first guess was that Joseph’s refusal to use the term “Bible” was significant. He wanted to know what the candidates thought about the King James Version, not the Bible in some generic sense. My second guess was that we had a “gotcha” question in the house.
So far, so good. My third assumption was that this query was designed to trip-up Rudy Giuliani. As a Catholic he might have felt compelled to point out that he consulted the New American Bible, the New Jerusalem Bible, or the more traditional Douai-Rheims but not the King James revered by so many Protestants. (Giuliani, incidentally, did not take the bait; he wisely avoided any discussion of which translation was dear to his heart).
But after reading Michael Luo’s column in The New York Times on Saturday it struck me that Giuliani was not the only, or maybe even the primary target of Joseph’s intervention. As Luo noted, Mormons do not believe that the King James Bible (which is part of their scriptural canon) is without error.
Perhaps this is why Romney seemed hesitant and uncharacteristically tongue-tied when Anderson Cooper pressed him on the question of whether he believed every word. The former governor of Massachusetts eventually concurred with that statement, apparently upsetting some co-religionists in the process.
Joseph later told The Dallas Morning News that he would not vote for Romney or Giuliani. Nor would he cast a ballot for Mike Huckabee (who he referred to as a “typical liberal pastor”).
Ron Paul is his man. If I am not mistaken the purpose of Joseph’s query was to “sharpen the contrasts”--as H.W.’s handlers used to say-- between Giuliani and Romney's personal faith commitments and those of the constituencies they are courting.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
